Max Life startup accelerator expands focus

Max Life Innovation Labs, the life insurer's startup accelerator programme for insurance technology-related products, has added speech recognition, document parsing among its other focus areas to rope in more startups. 

The programme claims it has received over 70 startup applications from India and abroad since its launch late August, as of Friday. 

Prior to the expansion, startups working in the fields of intelligent data acquisition and processing generated from online/offline sources, customer engagement in health and wellness, customer engagement in personal finance and retirement planning, smart underwriting, intelligent agent/seller hiring, financial management could participate in the programme, according to a statement from the insurance company. 

The ‘InsurTech’ accelerator programme also claims to have on-boarded ecosystem partners like the government of India's initiative Startup India, Amazon's cloud services platform Amazon Web Services, venture capital firm Blume Ventures, startup incubator Revstart, and early-stage business consultants Venture Garage. 

These partners will guide the selected startups with refining their business model, technology guidance, cloud credits, improving business pitch, early-stage investment amongst others, Max Life said.

In addition, Max Life may also partner with the startups in their applications to regulator IRDAI's (Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India) Sandbox initiative with relevant solutions, it said.